Here’s an account of how critics felt about Star Wars when it first came out. I was a little expecting the reviews to be on the negative side, but they kind of run the spectrum.

Lyman Stone explains how Palpatine was a failed founder of the Galactic Nation while Paul D Miller and Michael Boyle explain the failures of the rebel counterinsurgency and what they should do next time.

It was certainly a mess, but some of these criticisms of the Galactic Senate actually seem kind of weak to me.

In Jacobin, Sam Kriss argues that there were no Empires and Rebellions, only the evil Force.

A documentary on The War Between The Stars, by Ken Burns. Starring Daniel Drezner and Sonny Bunch.

Scientists explain the Endor Holocaust. Fried Ewoks all around, apparently.

The Kernel looks at what SciFi movies before Star Wars were like, giving some insight into what made Star Wars so revolutionary.

Zachary Feinstein looks at the economics of Star Wars, and why the Rebels failed to capitalize on their success.

It has primary been argued by people on the right that the Empire was actually the defensible good side and the rebellion was full of terrorists, while the left dissented. Maybe this will flip things around. At least as far as Han Solo is concerned.

For the first time in a really long time, we’re going back to visit the family over Christmas. I won’t be absent, but I came to the determination that there is simply no way to keep posting up and enjoy the limited time with the family. Also, I have an insane backlog of Linkluster links. So Linkluster is going to be a daily affair for the rest of the year. There will be other posts here and there, and I very much invite my cobloggers to pitch in.

I will take care to note that the links through this period will disproportionately be those that will have not appeared on Ordinary Times yet or will not appear on Ordinary Times (the latter set more likely than not to be at the top of Linkluster on any given day. Also, Monday’s Linkluster will be a Star Wars edition full of links that won’t be on Ordinary Times.

We’re leaving on Tuesday (though will be pretty busy getting ready between now and then), and I’m getting back on the 31st. Hopefully, I will be rested and re-energized and ready to go on my return.

I tend not to be of the mind that there are too many bowl games, but this year is really testing my patience. Even with my invitationals idea, I am not a fan of 5-7 teams having a post-season. I’m not especially in favor of 6-6 teams. It is a problem that you don’t always know how many teams are going to be bowl eligible, of course. Last year Texas State got burned and this year 5-7 teams are in. The ACC is advocating moving the cut-off to 7 wins with only enough 6-6 teams to fill remaining slots. That seems fair.

The second problem with this bowl season is that the Arizona Bowl will include two teams from the same conference and the Mountain West Conference is irate about it. Understandably so. The NCAA ruled that not only could 5-7 teams go to bowl games, but they would be able to go to their conference’s bowl games instead of being put in a “You’re lucky you’re going bowl game at all” pool. It is another instance of favoritism towards the major conferences at the expense of conferences like the MWC, though the odd thing is that the NCAA had decided not to play favorites when it came to which 5-7 teams could go bowling at all.

The bowl-conference arrangements are the biggest problem with my Invitationals idea, because the bowls have a lot riding on which teams will be showing and a 5-7 Texas is likely to make them more money than a 9-2 Toledo. Which makes doing things by merit difficult.

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The Mountain West Conference has also made the news by contemplating an expansion, specifically with Rice and UTEP. My initial thought was that Rice seemed like a pretty decent idea for the MWC but a bad deal for Rice, but everyone is telling me that I am wrong.

I don’t think it would be a bad idea for Rice if they went with some other schools, but with only UTEP (800+ miles away) they are off on their own island. Rice has a decent brand, but relatively little following. It would be incredibly easy for them to drop off the map entirely. So while Rice would give the conference ammunition in their next TV deal and some academic prestige and adding two schools would allow the conference to put Boise State in the west, Rice would run a serious risk of sinking further into oblivion. Rice’s apparent interest, it seemed to me, was the frustration of being left behind during the last realignment when their peers (SMU, Tulsa, and Tulane) and their cross-town rival (Houston) all moved on while they were left behind. That sort of frustration can lead schools to believe that they have to do something even if that something is unwise.

However, cruising the message boards it’s pretty much the opposite. UTEP fans desperately want in (which is no surprise), Rice fans really like the idea, and MWC seem pretty staunchly against any expansion that doesn’t include either BYU or Houston. And to the extent that they are okay with expansion, they like UTEP a lot more than Rice. Which makes sense given the geography (El Paso being closer to San Diego than Houston) and history, I guess, but UTEP is a wreck right now and Rice+UTSA would actually make more sense. For Rice’s part, their fans really are desperate to escape their conference. For that matter, fans on Louisiana Tech’s message board want to go with them.

And after being told how wrong I am repeatedly, I’m coming around to the idea that it’s a good deal for Rice. So the ball would be in the MWC’s court.

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It was sure looking like BYU was going to get the coach it wants in Navy’s Ken Niumatalolo. I’m not sure I remember the last time I’ve seen a coach speak publicly as glowingly as Niumatalolo speaks of the BYU job. But he declined. Apparently, BYU wanted him to abandon the offense that had lead to his success.

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Bret Beliema is the worst. Over and over again, the worst.

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Mark Richt really challenged my theory about fired coaches. As soon as Georgia canned him, his phone was seemingly ringing off the hook. The funny thing is that it wasn’t an especially curious fire. Richt had been underperforming at Georgia for years and years. On the other hand, that actually makes my theory less applicable to it. That Richt was fired for underperforming, and not for being a difficult person that the school was looking for a reason to fire instead of a reason to keep, it’s not surprising he had some good offers. None, though, as good as the one he was just fired from. It will be interesting to see how well he does at Miami, where (despite his being an alum) there may be a bit of a culture clash.

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Former USC coach Steve Sarkisian really needs to keep his head low right now, sober up, and wait for a job to open up at Fresno State in a couple years.

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I’m kind of jazzed about the Celebration Bowl, which will be the matchup between Alcorn State and North Carolina A&T of the SWAC and MEAC respectively, which are the two HBCU conferences. I mentioned a month ago that I wish they’d do something like this, not realizing they’d actually lined it up. (I never expect them to do what I think will be a good idea. Now I wish that the Ivy and Patriot Leagues would do something similar.

Stephen Hayes talks briefly of life on the terrorism watch list. Also, a four year old. And, perhaps less surprisingly, on terror lists go activists.

Like Marco Rubio, I also enjoy water. If you enjoy water as well, you should also consider voting for him.

Walmart is suing Puerto Rico over a tax targeted in their general direction.

If Trump or Carson wants to make a third party bid, they have until Spring to try. I’d been wondering this myself, but mostly from the opposite angle: In the unlikely event of a Trump nomination, when can the rest of the party find a John Anderson?

Germany and Facebook are teaming up to “put an end to “Hate Speech“. Some Brazilians, however, are taking matters into their own hands.

Don’t fear the brokered convention or anything, but there’s a secret plan to install Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee. Or will it be Ted Cruz?

Conspiracy-fodder: Not only is Donald Trump doing his best to destroy the Republican coalition, but his outbursts seem to be rescuing the Democrats. Honestly, I wonder if this isn’t like Wag The Dog, which for years left everybody believing every military action ever was a head-fake because it coincided with some scandal except that there was always some scandal whether there was a military action or not.

When Stone Cold Steve Austin gave The Donald the stunner. Turns out – not surprisingly, I guess – Trump was a good sport.

Mark Begich makes the case for allowing oil exports. Paul Ryan is working on it.

Eric Holthaus is really, really excited about the new climate deal. Reading things over, well, if existing projections are accurate I still think we’re looking at less of this and more of this. Also skeptical: James Hansen. Not skeptical: Vox. Also not skeptical: journalists.

Also, Holthaus really likes Bernie Sanders’s climate change plan, except one thing.

Men, it turns out, are lazy.

Scott Weiland’s family would like to ask you not to romanticize his tragedy.

Unlike Jonathan Last, I have no strong opinion on the fact that the new Hulk is Korean-American other than being vaguely glad he’s American, but I don’t think I like the whole “retains is faculties while The Hulk” thing.

Dog 911: what's ur emergency? Dog: THEYRE PUSHIN THAT LOUD THING AROUND ON THE CARPET AGAIN Dog 911: OMG Dog: OMG Dog 911: OMG Dog: OMG

— Reverend Scott (@Reverend_Scott) August 21, 2015

I’m well aware the story of my life is much more interesting to me than to others. So believe it or not, I’m reluctant to explain the parts of my personal background that inform my approach to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Still and even so, I am going to give a little bit of that background, mostly because I promised Michael Drew I would (so blame him), but also because it’s probably a good idea to lay my biases on the table. I intend this OP only as an autobiographical observation and not as an extension of my arguments. I don’t expect anyone reading this to change their minds about what I’ve written or might write in the future. In fact, I’m not even confident it will fully explain why I’m so ambivalent about Sagan. Some of you may have had very similar experiences to mine and come to very different conclusions.

This post has all the faults of any autobiographical account. I’m relying almost entirely on memory to make a representation that’s at least a little self-serving. I do promise, however, that I have no stories of Saganite hoodlums shaking me down for my lunch money in middle school so they can buy “star dust.”

Another fault of my post is that it’s long. One thing worse than reading a solipsistic post about someone else’s life is reading a very, very long solipsistic post about someone else’s life that runs more than 3,200 words. So I beg your indulgence.

(more…)

I was sent this story, about free-market reformer of socialism within France’s Socialist Party:

Previously an aide to French President François Hollande, he was appointed as Finance Minister with a mandate to, in a word, liberalize France’s economy in a desperate bid to boost employment and rescue Hollande’s abysmal poll ratings. Macron then embarked on a frenzied program of free market reforms, in a country that is one of the most anti-market in the developed world, and which voted in a Socialist president and parliament three years ago.

Macron has been unashamed. Instead of keeping his head down, he keeps making remarks in the press almost designed to rile up his own side. He has called for reforming civil service rules, a longstanding demand of the right and anathema to the left. According to reports, he said privately that Hollande’s plan to raise taxes on the rich would make France “like Cuba but without the sun,” and almost resigned as presidential advisor because he felt a pensions reform plan didn’t cut enough. He talks about being part of the “reality-based left” and of being a “left-wing supply-sider.”

I’m not really going to explore the French political aspect of this, but the link got me thinking about party names. Specifically, the slight oddity that a party that calls itself the Socialist Party would have a free-marketeer at its financial helm, and more than that about party names. {Note, this post contains minor spoilers for Harry Turtledove’s Southern Victory series, mostly as a jumping off point.}

In Harry Turtledove’s Southern Victory series, in the 1880’s the Republican Party having been elected only twice and twice having presidents lead them into losing wars becomes so disgraced that it is considered beyond redemption. Abe Lincoln, one of the two presidents to lose said wars, turns coat again and helps found the Socialist Party, which over time replaces the Republican Party as the second major party. Even without the southern states, the country is not ready for a the sort of Socialism that the party offers and while the Socialist Party and Republican Party split the opposition the Democrats have the presidency completely uninterrupted from 1885 to the 1920’s.

Now, as a matter of political science, Turtledove is far too comfortable with one-party rule as there is a similar dynamic in his Confederacy where one political party, the Whigs, obtain uninterrupted power from the formation of their parties (whenever that occurred) to the 1930’s. The dynamic in the Confederacy is explainable in part due to corruption as well as a minority party (Radical Liberals) whose base of support is both regional (Chihuahua, Sonora, and Cuba) and a disregarded minority. In the United States, it’s mostly due to the spoiling Republicans and the intransigence of the Socialist Party. The best I could do to justify that occurance is that a party so built on an unwavering socialist foundation wouldn’t be able to expand its support to a majority (indeed, throughout the novel they seem to mostly be speaking a foreign language, though presumably the tenets and terminology of socialism are at least somewhat more familiar in that timeline).

What occurred to me is that by calling themselves Socialists, they sort of painted themselves in a box that made it extremely difficult to win. Perhaps if they’d gone with Social Democrats! That would, at least, give them room to have more than one wing to try to cobble together a majority. While Social Democrat has a particular meaning, it is one that at least seems more subject to evolution over time. And indeed, it has evolved over time. Christian Democrat is the conservative alternative in Germany, though as a name it may make it harder to bring Turkish-Germans into the coalition.

I may not be a fan of the two political parties we have, but I will say this for them: They have good names. There is nothing in the word Democrats or Republicans that nails them down to supporting a particularly ideology. There will never be the oxymoronology of the free-marketeer Socialist. The coalitions have changed considerably over the years, but the names have never become as disjointed as with the conservative Liberal Party of Australia or Liberal Democrat Party of Japan, nor as awkward as the Labour Party’s transition to being the party of the university and the professional class that has to watch what it says about the working class? And unlike the Tories and the two major parties Canada, it gives us room to talk about the conservative wing of the GOP versus the moderate, without having to constantly specify “lower case c” and “upper case C” and so on. Ditto for their Liberals (which have been using that name for considerably longer). Though, how long will the New Democrats be new?

The rival party to the Socialists in France go by the name Republicans, though that is something of a recent development. The name of the Gaulist/center-right party has changed over time through some splinters, mergers, and rebranding. That also works and it would actually be a lot easier if each time a coalition died the next coalition came back under a different name (like Federalist to Whig to Republican) instead of the same name with a different meaning (Democrat to Democrat). But if the party names are hard-coded in there, I’m not sure we could have better names.

Bernardo Aparicio Garcia writes about live in Pablo Escobar’s Colombia.

Adam Ozimek takes issue with the idea that macroeconomics is all about the confirmation of priors.

Michael McShane looks at Tiny Schools. The questions about scalability seem valid, but I would love for us to have a regime to enable them.

Contrary to my view a decade ago, I think there may be a justification for public spending on stadia and the like (at least, so long as we allow professional leagues their extortion), but according to a new study it really isn’t so.

Noah Feldman talks about how the Soviets stole a Van Gogh.

Here’s a year-long road-trip you can take if you are insanely passionate about 70-degree weather.

The Greeks say “No Smoking sign? I don’t see no No Smoking sign.”

Fewer Americans are getting married in churches.

Oooh, and annotated map of Middle-earth!

Maybe we would have better infrastructure if it didn’t cost so much.

If you walk a mile in someone’s shoes, you will… become judgmental as hell.

Creepy-arse stuff like “spiders the sizes of puppies” are supposed to be in Australia, not the Americas!

Norwegians are all about ghost-hunting.

David Frum says that the trade-off between security and liberty is a false one. As does Reason’s Ronald Bailey, though in markedly different ways.

How prisons fleece prisoners and their families.

Looper says that a Krypton TV show is doomed to failure because:

1. Prequels are inherently pointless
2. We already had 10 years of a dumb Superman prequel called Smallville
3. Its connections to the DC Universe are weak, at best
4. Krypton is literally the least interesting part about Superman
5. Spoiler Alert: Krypton explodes!

I pretty strongly disagree. Given that three of the five objections are objections to prequels, though, that might be the main source of the disagreement. I think knowing where something is headed can make something more enjoyable, as you watch it unfold. It requires a different sort of storytelling, but that Krypton explodes is no more spoilery than that Oliver Queen will find his way out of his current predicament, whatever it is. The only difference is whether it is explicit about knowing the ending, and being explicit can open narrative doors. The story is how you get there, not where you get.

Is Krypton the least interesting thing about Superman? I tend to think that Superman himself is the least interesting thing about Superman. Metropolis is interesting, the Daily Planet is interesting, and even Clark Kent is interesting. Superman himself is pretty inherently dull. This is why Superman is best used as an ancillary character in someone else’s story. Krypton has the advantage of being relatively uncharted territory. It’s more of a blank slate, apart from comics.

I do think the lack of tie-in with the DC Universe can be potentially troublesome. Not because it needs to be, but because there is always the tendency of writers to try to create tie-ins. Arrow and The Flash are replete with examples of using existing other characters just because they can. Sometimes it is used to good effect, but other times it creates problems because when they later have an actual use for the character, they’ve already burned it. So when they need Black Canary, they have to start with someone that isn’t Dinah Laurel Lance.

This was a huge problem in Hawkworld, a comic book series that was meant to be a prequel to Hawkman. The story featured future Hawkman Katar Hol as a police officer on Thanagar. Except that they wanted to be able to do crossovers, so they fiddled with continuity to such a degree that they never really recovered from it. The existing Katar Hol on earth was changed to a Thanagarian spy. It was a real stretch and Hawkman became notorious as having the worst continuity this side of Power Girl.

But on the whole, I think it can work artistically if not commercially. If that’s the case, it’ll be a lot like Caprica, the prequel to Battlestar Galactica which which Krypton would share a great deal in common. Or maybe it will suck artistically, with Krypton’s fall being an over-the-top metaphor with what the writers think is wrong with the Earth. I worry about that a lot more than I do already knowing the ending.

We just can’t secure the Mexican border. Well, I mean, unless we decided we needed to.

What are you hiding? Kathryn Watson reports that our private medical records are not as private as we might hope.

The iTunes EULA, in graphic novel form…. {via}

“That’s what the terrorists want.”

So… they’re remaking Memento. Perhaps they’ve forgotten that the first can’t really be improved upon, and are doomed to re-do what has already been done to no effect.

Facebook is adopting a new feature to hide your ex after a breakup.

Presumed dead for years, it turned out that she just wanted to game and hang out.

How representative or reasonable we should consider the actions of student protesters aside, Millennials have a more jaundiced view of free speech compared to their elders. And not, as I had initially hoped, merely as a product of age.

The American President, the Aaron Sorkin film that sort of laid a blueprint for The West Wing, is twenty years old. I enjoyed the movie greatly. Especially the part where the president sabotaged his re-election prospect for bills that won’t pass to impress a girl.

The planet Mars is goin’ to the chapel and maybe gonna get married. (It’s okay, the moons were problematic anyway.)

The story of a man who was bilked for over $700,000 by psychics.

Jared Fogle is blaming the Subway diet for his sex crimes.

A gun ban is most popular among educated whites in DC, and least popular among blacks.

In New Orleans, a medical student took a bullet to prevent a girl from being absconded. Also, Doo Doo the clown.

Los Angeles is considering using license plate readers to send men who drive into the wrong part of town nasty letters.

For the most part, I don’t miss smoking. There are things that I do miss about it, but over time I have come to appreciate vaping more for the most part. I have a wider variety of flavors. There’s no lingering odor. Also, I’m not killing myself nearly as quickly. Probably.

There have been only a few times that I have longingly imagined a cigarette in my hand and my mouth. One of which was last Thanksgiving. It was a family gathering on Clancy’s mother’s side. As it happens, she lives a few hours inland of us, so we were able to make the trip. Dork that I am, I packed everything to be able to puff… except the eliquid. I didn’t realize it until it was way too late, though.

The prospect of several days, surrounded by people, without the ability to puff was really quite daunting. I didn’t think I would be able to do it. I pondered going to a convenience store and getting some disposables. The problem is that the stuff they sell in convenience stores is really not very good. At all. Though it’s the same basic mechanism that I did successfully use to quit, I had a hard time imagining going back.

I had an easier time imagining smoking. Just for a couple of days, you understand. Just until I got back. I’d recently passed the one year mark, though. And “just one” is a pretty bad policy to anyone who has been addicted. Yeah, some people can do that. More can’t.

It didn’t take a half-an-hour before a rather obvious thought occurred to me: Vape shops. I’d never been in a vape shop before. I got my equipment and always got my ejuice online. Desperate times called for desperate measures, however, and it turned out that there was a vape shop in town. It cost about $1.08 a milliliter, which is between 2-5x what I usually pay, but I was happy to pay it.

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Besides that, the only times when I’ve missed smoking have involved equipment problems with my devices. The first-generation stuff I got was very easy, albeit unsatisfying. The second generation was much more satisfying, and cheaper in the overall, but required a lot more work. There were tanks to clean, tanks to keep full, coils to replace, batteries to make sure they were charged. It was kind of a pain. It was made all the moreso by the difficulties I had with the wicks and coils, which were a real pain to install and you had to do it just right or you wouldn’t get a good vape at all. The second generation was also wildly inconsistent, which may be related to the wick problems but were also an issue that the wicks would burn out quickly and I never knew whether it was just a temporary thing or if I needed to replace the darn thing.

In any event, when I would have really bad vape days, when I was nearing the end of most of my wicks and the new wicks I installed weren’t working right, it was hard not to think of what was needed to smoke a cigarette: You buy a cigarette and you light it on fire and breathe in the smoke. That’s pretty much it.

I’m on the third generation now, which has some of the maintenance of the second generation, but is on the whole much easier. It is a lot more satisfying, so even if the coils aren’t perfect it’s better on its bad day than a second-generation is on a good day. And replacing the coil is a snap and I don’t have to do it as often and it’s harder to screw up.

I’m back to the point where I don’t even unseriously fantasize about smoking a cigarette.

All of which is a way of saying that the technology matters. And as the FDA and EU ramp up regulations, they’re doing so with a disregard for the vaping experience. I think they might think that making it a bit of a pain is a good thing. I obviously disagree. These thoughts will be further explored in a coming post on OT. But for now I will just say that we really do want vaping to be easy. Because smoking will always be easier.